Sunday, July 30. 2017

In 1729 the city of Baltimore was founded. In 1818 novelist and poet Emily Bronte was born in Thornton, England. In 1863 Henry Ford was born in Dearborn, MI. In 1864 Union forces tried to take Petersburg, VA, by exploding a mine under Confederate defense lines; the attack failed. In 1889 television pioneer Vladimir Zworykin was born in Murom, Russia. In 1890 Casey Stengel was born in Kansas City, MO. In 1916 2,000 tons of explosives detonated near New York Harbor on the island of Black Tom, in what was then the largest explosion ever in the US. Historians believe that the munitions, bound for Britain, were blown up by German agents in what was the first major state-sponsored terrorist event in the US. In 1945 the battle cruiser USS Indianapolis, which had just delivered components for the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine; only 316 out of 1,196 men survived the sinking and shark-infested waters. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Social Security Act of 1965 into law, establishing Medicare and Medicaid. In 1974 President Richard M. Nixon released subpoenaed White House recordings after being ordered to do so by the US Supreme Court. In 1975 former Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in suburban Detroit -- although presumed dead, his remains have never been found; also on this day, representatives of 35 countries convened in Finland for a conference on security and human rights that resulted in the Helsinki accords. In 1980 the Israeli Knesset passed a law reaffirming all of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. In 1997 14 Israelis were killed in a double suicide bombing in a Jerusalem marketplace; Hamas terrorists claimed responsibility for the bombings. In 2004 leaders of the Sept. 11 commission urged senators to embrace their proposals for massive changes to the nation's intelligence structure.